Hill farmers are the practitioners of complex, diverse and risk-prone agriculture. They are also facing lack of<br />information dissemination channels which causes a huge communication gap in hills. The lack of information<br />dissemination channels in hills is highly attributed to the geographical disadvantages of distantly located hamlets<br />and fragmented household of hills. ICT has a significant role to bridge the gap of information dissemination in<br />hills. In the present study an attempt has been made to delineate the extent of use of ICT tools by hill farmers and the<br />associated social factors which influence the extent of use of ICT tools by the farmers. The study was conducted in<br />Mahatgaon cluster of Hawalbagh block in Almora district, Uttarakhand taking a random sample of 100 farmers.<br />The data was collected by a pre-tested structured interview schedule through personal interview method. The study<br />revealed that majority of farmers often used mobile phone (98%) followed by TV (97%), telephone (60%), radio<br />(57%) and internet (49%) as ICT tools. The ranking of the ICT tools used by the respondents was also done on the<br />basis of MWS. It was found that mobile was in the first rank followed by television and radio. Internet was found to<br />be in the last rank as far the usage is concerned. Out of total 14 independent variables studied, it was identified that<br />factors viz. annual income, no. of crops cultivated, herd size, social participation, extension contact, mass media<br />exposure and innovativeness were highly associated with the extent of ICT usage at 1% level of significance<br />whereas factors viz. education, family size, landholding, training attended were associated with the extent of ICT<br />usage at 5% level of significance.

Keyword: Extent of use; Social factors; Pearson product moment; Correlation